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Crestfall: The Next Stage

As most of you are well aware, the last couple weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. We think the idea behind the LGN was a noble one, or at least, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but later events and revelations showed we had made some poor choices. Things didn't turn out the way we had planned or hoped; we're a little disappointed, and to the community members we offended or let down, we're very sorry. We want to assure you, that's over now: we're still working, still engaged, and excited for the future of Crestfall.

First, I have to address the major changes we intend to make going forward. We were unprepared for the level of scrutiny and personal privacy invasion that accompanied the most recent dramatic outburst, and for a time did strongly consider cancelling the project entirely. We have elected instead to go a different route. This weekend, we will be muting or removing all public Discord channels and ceasing all involvement on reddit. Discord will still be utilized for internal communication, but discussion with the community will come on these forums only. Our CMs and mods have been working overtime, but the amount of time spent attempting to control communication via instant messaging has proven to be too much of a distraction from the work of developing the project.

Going forward, we are going to establish a better internal communication mechanism to allow our staff to more effectively answer questions and resolve situations that come up. We plan to thoroughly (within reason) examine any future additions to the staff to make sure we maintain a good reputation, and our good internal relationship, as we grow. We also plan to consult with trusted community members before deciding on any major changes or considerations so we can better predict the response and potential pitfalls.

As for the server itself, our plans for the project are reverting to our original intentions. We still plan to release in 2017. Our closed beta for class testing is still ongoing. We will continue to invite additional beta testers as necessary and will contact them individually using the information provided in their applications. Volunteers interested in scripting will be contacted in the same method that they contacted us, whether on Discord or the forums.

When we are ready for launch, Crestfall will have a PvE and PvP realm, with a 5k population cap. If the peaks begin hitting 4k, we will open additional realms as necessary to keep potential queue times down. We will do progressive content releases - as originally planned, not perfectly patch by patch, but a close approximation that will be easier for us to manage. We will accept voluntary donations but there will be no purchase of in-game items for real money. In the event that voluntary donations are insufficient to maintain the realms we will consider opening a cash shop for vanity items such as TCG items or Blizzcon pets, but at no point will we sell levels, gear, gold, or anything else with an in-game effect. We'd rather just shut down the realm than compromise our integrity in that way.

When we are ready to progress to TBC, we will provide a period of time where we allow players to flag their characters for transfer to TBC. At the end of this period, flagged characters will be moved along with their entire inventory to the TBC realm in a 2.0.1 pre-patch state. This new TBC realm will experience the Dark Portal event and continue on with Burning Crusade content. At any time, characters left behind on the Vanilla realm can be manually flagged by the player, and at the next server maintenance, they will be transferred to the TBC realm. No copies of characters will be left behind, but new characters can be rolled on any realm at any time.

After the new realm is open and players have transferred, we will monitor realm populations. If there are insufficient players remaining on the Vanilla realms to maintain a reasonable play experience or financial viability, we will merge realms. We will of course consult with the community before merging any realms to make sure it is handled in a responsible manner. If players are happy with their current populations, even if they are low, then we have no problem leaving them open as long as the realms are financially sustainable. While we reserve the right to make changes if glaring problems are exposed with the process, this is the plan we intend to follow for all expansion progressions.

The reason we are going to do transfers rather than copies is that it bypasses a major problem with resources. We can't have people shuffling around gold or items to alts and transferring up an infinite amount of resources for themselves or their guild. We would have to implement a very restrictive cap on what could be carried forward in order to prevent duping and exploitation, which penalizes any player who earned their gold and items legitimately. This way, items that are moved from Vanilla to TBC are removed from the Vanilla economy, preventing massive imbalances.

So, a player can roll on the Vanilla realm, enjoy their levelling and progression experience, and when it's time for TBC, if they want to progress to the new expansion, they can do so immediately. If they decide with their guild that they want to stay in Vanilla for a few more weeks or months and complete Naxxramas or hit Rank 14, or complete whatever goals they set for themselves, they can do that before transferring up and rejoining the main stream. Players who wish to stay in Vanilla permanently can also do so, though they will have to be prepared for the potential of a server merge if the populations drop too far to be sustainable.

There's the plan. We're past the delays and back to work on our own project. Our focus is 100% on getting Crestfall up and running as soon as possible. We're glad to be free of distractions and once again excited about the future. I will continue with bi-weekly development blogs to give some insight into what we're working on, but due to this message going out so close, I'm going to push it back by one week. My next blog post will be on Monday, March 6th and will continue every other week from then on. For people who are interested in contributing to the project, you can do so by contributing to the forums, as this is where the community will always be. While we are no longer working with teams from other projects, we will continue to be respectful and polite towards them, and we also ask members of our forums to do the same.

We hope you'll enjoy following along with us as we work to make Crestfall the next stage in WoW emulation.

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I'll be answering questions that come up as a result of the post here.

Q) Do I need to keep the Crestfall Discord active?

A) Public channels will be muted and/or removed, so there won't be any general conversation there. However, we will keep the server running for future voice Q&A events or in order to contact volunteers who provided no other contact venue. For volunteer scripters, you can idle in the existing Discord if you don't mind that, but you can also PM me on Discord (or here) and I can add you to my personal contact list, or if you prefer, you can provide me with your forum account or email address if those are your preferred contact methods.

Q) What level of transparency do you intend to have among staff members?

A) We are going to have to investigate potential new staff members' past history with regards to private servers. I don't want to explain in detail here exactly how we will go about that since that would make it easier for someone dishonest to conceal any history of wrongdoing. We will not require them, however, to give us their personal information (ie. full name, location, etc.). In any case, new members would obviously join with limited access and responsibilities, and work under the direct supervision of the relevant department lead. The "old guard" of Crestfall's staff mostly know each other by name, but we have been together a long time and have a well-established trust and friendship between us. New members obviously won't have that kind of camaraderie, though we certainly hope to build friendships and a mutual respect with everyone who joins the team.

Q) Will battlegrounds be linked if you eventually open more than one server?

A) It's something that is technically possible but a great deal of work. We'll avoid it if we can, but if queue times or queue dodging are judged to be a serious enough problem, we can work on the implementation of cross-realm battlegrounds. I won't get into the technical details of this, but suffice to say it is quite complex. Some of the work for it has already been done, so we know it is possible, and we know how to do it, it's just low priority at the moment.

Q) Assuming there only is one failing PVP and one failing PVE realm, which way would the merger go if the cash flow isn't great enough?

A) We will consult with the community before any mergers to get some input on how they would prefer things to be handled. In other words, it will depend on the situation at the time, and isn't really possible to answer now. I would expect that the smaller realm being merged into the larger realm would be the most likely outcome, but again, it depends. One thing, we are investigating the feasibility of making it so that when you create a character, that name is then reserved across all realms. There's a bit of a technical challenge to this, but it would remove the worry about naming priority and who is forced to change names in the event of a conflict caused by a merger. No promises on this one, it's just an idea at this point, but it seemed relevant so I thought I would share it.

Q) Will it be possible to transfer characters from Elysium to Crestfall?

A) No. We no longer have any affiliation with the Elysium project.

Q) Will Maraudon be available at launch?

A) This isn't 100% guaranteed, but the idea is yes, we would like it to be available at launch. It makes more sense to have it available for levelling.

Q) Will it be possible to transfer characters to Burning Crusade below level 60?

A) Good question. We haven't really talked about this. I would think that you could flag a character of any level for transfer, it's certainly closer to Blizzlike. We'll discuss this internally and see if there are any problems that this creates, but I can't think of anything major offhand. Forcing players to level 1-58 on the Vanilla realms would certainly keep them more populated, but it causes issues with bank alts etc. that I would rather avoid. We'll address this with more finality later.

Q) Where is the website?

A) Our initial plan was to have a Wordpress site linking to the forums. Audio created a gorgeous one, but due to the amount of attacks going on we sidelined it due to some inherent weaknesses in that format. Our web team is slowly putting together a few things for some new web content. Soon(tm).

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Over time I began to feel that no one person or a group of persons should be held responsible for all the decisions and stress involved with running and developing a private server and my fears became slightly true in that manner but I applaud your continued efforts.

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This weekend, we will be muting or removing all public Discord channels and ceasing all involvement on reddit.

15 minutes ago, Darkrasp said:

For people who are interested in contributing to the project, you can do so by contributing to the forums, as this is where the community will always be.

Senpai...this is music to my ears. I'm so glad you guys are continuing this project...everyone here on the forums really wants this to succeed. As I said before, I want CF to be my new home. Please, still take any time you need to recover from all the BS that happened in the past week and know that we here are looking forward to your future updates.
Wishing you all the best and thanking you guys from the bottom of my heart.

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Senpai...this is music to my ears. I'm so glad you guys are continuing this project...everyone here on the forums really wants this to succeed. As I said before, I want CF to be my new home. Please, still take any time you need to recover from all the BS that happened in the past week and know that we here are looking forward to your future updates.
Wishing you all the best and thanking you guys from the bottom of my heart.

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Senpai...this is music to my ears. I'm so glad you guys are continuing this project...everyone here on the forums really wants this to succeed. As I said before, I want CF to be my new home. Please, still take any time you need to recover from all the BS that happened in the past week and know that we here are looking forward to your future updates.
Wishing you all the best and thanking you guys from the bottom of my heart.

This.

I don't have the time or the mental stamina to wade through the crap in discord. Being able to read through old discussions and communicate with others via forums is much more pleasant.

How confident are you guys that you can afford to run multiple realms in the long run? I don't know anything about the costs involved but from what I've read, elysium has been burning through a lot of money. Also, is the option to remain on BC or WotLK realms, assuming the project makes it that far, still going to happen?

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@Darkrasp Thank you, thank you, thank you for seeing reason. I am genuinely sorry on behalf of the toxic influences that saw fit to pry into the personal lives of the staff; that is totally unacceptable. As someone who was obviously against that whole LGN business from the word 'go', I'm glad it's largely blown over. I always wished you guys the best of luck but now I can again look forward to actually being a part of CF instead of just distantly hoping it succeeds.

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Excellent post. In my honest opinion those who have stuck around long enough to see this project come to fruition will gladly help sustain the server if that need every arises. Most were willing to pay a monthly fee to blizzard for legacy servers so why not take that money and give it back to the community here. You have definitely lit another spark in this guys heart, and I look forward to the projects eventual release and updates.

One note though, please be sure to take care of yourselves physically as well as emotionally. None of you are good if those two things are not first in order.

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I like how you are handling expansion progression (giving the player the flexibility to move on when the player was ready). That was my big concern with the LGN concept you had before (forcing a player to go to TBC or be permanently stuck at Vanilla).